Of two minds when it comes to Red Sox championships

#FeartheBeard Red Sox beard.

In keeping with a Gemini personality, I’m of two minds when it comes to Red Sox World Series championships.

I can’t decide, if I were to choose, which is most significant to me: 2004 or 2013. I don’t put 2007 into the mix because, after 2004, even as wonderful as it was, it was more of an afterthought, almost a foregone conclusion.

But there is drama and personal significance to both 2004 and 2013.

The 2004  championship, while coming with a four-game sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals, was the break of a 86-year curse of lost opportunities, lost championships, including the crushing loss in 1986 to the New York Mets.

The ‘04 championship was preceded by an improbable run against the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series (ACLS), with the Sox winning four straight to get into the Series against the Cards.

The 2013 championship was won with game 6 at Fenway Park, the first championship won at home since 1918. The entire series was an improbable run - the team that finished in last place in the 2012 season spent most of the 2013 season in first place. It was about first-year manager John Farrell, and the beards, and the solidarity behind the city of Boston wracked in April by the marathon bombings.

Baseball and championships encompass generations. What happens in the moment reverberates into the past and pushes out into the future.

My father was a lifelong Red Sox fan, but lived in 66 years without seeing a World Series champion. His urn bears the Sox baseball cap he wore. The 2004 win was as much a win for departed fans as it was for the fans who lived to see it.

In 60 years, I’ve seen three championships, my children have seen three.

Technology gave me the opportunity to share the 2013 series with my son David, with me in Durham, N.H., and David in Brooklyn, N.Y. We watched the game together one night by way of FaceTime on our iPhones. The other nights we texted back and forth, commenting on the good, the bad, the ugly and the great.

We were on the phone together when Koji struck out Matt Carpenter for the final out.

A favorite is impossible. It’s like my son and my daughter: I don’t have a favorite, I love them both equally.

Monumental Red Sox collapse is my fault

Don’t blame Terry Francona for the Red Sox September swoon. As manager of a failed team, he didn’t under-manage.

And don’t blame Sox general manager Theo Epstein for putting together a baseball team that, in the end, didn’t have the cohesiveness to hold grip on a playoff spot, despite a nine-game lead at the beginning of September.

And don’t blame $142 million Carl Crawford or any of the other players for sub-par performances, especially in the clutch.

Blame me.

I’m the reason for the Red Sox monumentally, historically awful collapse.

I didn’t invest enough mojo, enough enthusiasm in the team this season.

I’m a Red Sox fan and a citizen of Red Sox Nation, but I failed in my duties as both a fan and a citizen.

My Red Sox cap should be confiscated. I should be stripped of my citizenship and deported.

As a true fan, you have to invest yourself into a team’s season. You have to care, not some of the time, but all of the time.

My normal contribution to a season is not heroic, by any means.

My contribution has been to get to at least one Red Sox game a year.

Usually, that means at Fenway Park in Boston, where a day or evening at the park is the equivalent of a monthly car payment.

A couple of times it meant taking in an away game, the Red Sox at Baltimore.

But it’s a tradition that I managed to keep up for many years: At least one game a year in person.

Until this year.

I didn’t make a game with either of my two adult children, which usually happens. I didn’t make a game with my wife, which usually happens.

It was a tradition that spanned a decade that included two World Series and almost the guarantee that they’d at least get into the playoffs.

Not this year.

Somehow, other parts of my life got in the way. Ultimately, I took my eye off the ball.

They started going into their September slide and I was selfishly thinking they would rebound, just as they did after their miserable start in April.

But they didn’t rebound. And I continued to go about my merry way, thinking that the unthinkable couldn’t happen.

But it did.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

I won’t let it happen again. Promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.

Let us pray ... or something

It's time to go to church ... time to light votive candles ... time to get seriously spiritual. The Red Sox are in the playoffs.

Those of us who are Red Sox fans -- who are citizens in good standing of Red Sox Nation -- get especially religious at this time of year . We invoke the name of the Almighty in an effort to get the higher power infused in our bats and our fielding and our pitching. It doesn't help that our first round opponents are known as the Angels.

Granted, there are times when we invoke the name of the Almighty in ways that aren't so holy, but that's what this team does to us. We do this because we've been here before in the playoffs and it hasn't been pretty

I saw on television what happened with Bucky Freakin' Dent in 1978 American League division race playoff game and it wasn't pretty. I saw what happened with Billy Buckner in the 1986 World Series and it wasn't pretty. I saw what happened with Aaron Freakin' Boone in the 2003 American League championship series. Not pretty is an understatement ... it was ugly, ugly, ugly.

We yelled at the television -- screamed I tell you -- at Grady Little to take out Pedro Martinez as Petey began to implode on the mound at Yankee Stadium in the 2003 American League Championship Series. I'm still hoarse from that one.

Sure, we accept and are thankful for the World Series championships in 2004 and 2007. They were life fulfilling and life affirming dreams for many people. The 2004 World Series supposedly broke an 86-year-old curse originally brought on by the Sox sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919.

But the true Red Sox fan, while he or she may no longer live with The Curse, lives with a sense of The Dread. We can be Catholic or Jewish, Methodist or Muslim, Baptist or Buddhist, agnostic or atheist, we all share the Red Sox religion of Dread in the true Calvinist tradition that only through suffering can we find salvation.

Newer citizens of Red Sox Nation, those who took their oath of citizenship after the championship in 2004, expect the team to win in the post-season. They see winning in the post season as part of the natural course of events: the sun will rise, the Red Sox will win. Hey, they said, they did it in 2004 and again in 2007 ... no sweat.

Older Red Sox Nation citizens, however, expect the team to lose. We hope for the best, pray for the best, are willing to sell our internal organs in hopes of the best, but we expect the worst. That's our conditioning. That's how Dent and Buckner and Boone and Little and many others taught us to be.

We are consumed with The Dread that injury to key players might be this year's Achilles heel:

Josh Beckett -- oblique

J.D. Drew -- back spasms

Mike Lowell -- hip flexor

Dice-K (pictured above) -- the fact that he throws too many balls

I know, I know. Technically, throwing balls instead of strikes isn't an injury, but that's how deep The Dread can run in the veins of those of us who worry too much.

Am I feeling less of The Dread as a result of Wednesday night's first game 4-1 win against the Anaheim Angels?

No, it's a long October.

All together now: "Our Father, who art in heaven ..."

Discourse that is sometimes off course

I got a glimpse recently into the discourse of the 21st century. It's both fascinating and troubling.

The glimpse came through YouTube, the on-line video posting service. YouTube gives you the opportunity to make your videos available for everyone to see, and everyone in turn has the opportunity to rate and comment on your offering.

What I saw was fascinating in how immediate and wide-ranging the commentary can be. It was troubling in that most of the discussion was done in grammar shorthand that almost requires a translation dictionary. It was additionally troubling in the fact that some of the discussion was so inane.

Here's a little background: I recently purchased a Flip Mino camcorder. It's small and very easy to use, records to an internal memory -- no tapes, no memory cards to insert and extract. You can shoot a video and easily transfer it by way of a USB connection to your computer, then easily upload to YouTube or other video-sharing web sites.

I took my new gizmo to Fenway Park in Boston for the Aug. 30 game between the Red Sox and Los Angeles Angels. This was the week the trade rumors regarding Sox left fielder and slugger Manny Ramirez were at a fever pitch with the trade deadline set to expire the next afternoon. I took video of the crowd doing "the wave" and singing "Sweet Caroline" during the middle of the eighth inning. During the Red Sox half of the eighth it dawned on me it could be the last at-bat for Ramirez as a member of the Red Sox.

So I recorded the at-bat, which ended as a fly-out, and sure enough the next day Manny was traded to the L.A. Dodgers. I posted the Manny video on YouTube and over the next several days watched as the number of views grew and grew.

This Manny video and was not record-breaking content by any means. As of this writing, my view count was up to about 3,800. Some videos generate hundreds of thousands of views. One current video of some guy in China using telephone touch pads to play piano music is up to almost 500,000.

The fact that it generated that much viewer interest was amusing. The fact that a video prompted wide-ranging discussion involving Boston vs. Los Angeles sports, the Boston vs. New York rivalry, and Ramirez's potential Baseball Hall of Fame credentials was a real eye opener. The Manny video has 70 comments attached to it.

But here's the but:

What am I to make of: "yaya wat ev!!!!" Or: "And if ur not a laker fan which team u voting 4?"

I know it's all part of the new keyboard shorthand, but I'm old school when it comes to communicating -- I believe in writing in complete sentences, in emails and on the BlackBerry. One writer talked of Manny being "indicted" into the Hall of Fame. My temptation as the video poster was not to join in the conversation to talk of the merits of Manny going into the Hall of Fame; my temptation was as a former newspaper editor to discourage poor usage and tell the writer that someone is "inducted" not "indicted" into the Hall of Fame.

The discourse contained some troubling profanity and an occasional racial or lifestyle epithet. I didn't interpret the epithets as being meant to harm; they were meant to emphasize a point but were still inappropriate no matter their context.

I come from a generation of writing on paper and in middle age made the migration to the bits and bytes of online. But certain rules that guided me on paper guide me online, as does writing behavior.

It's an unedited and anything-goes online universe. The good news is that it generates discourse that is often impassioned and reasoned; the bad news is that u r left 2 wondering how much of it will degenerate into shorthand rants that ultimately will dissolve from discourse to babble.